Sorry, I was wrong; I would like to make one more point. Probably the biggest problem with the formal system of higher education is that it teaches a perspective which causes people to miss deliberate malice in action.
In my opinion one of the fundamental changes which needs to occur in the educational system is to teach people how to critically differentiate accident or 'stupidity' from deliberate malice. Failing to do so grants malevolent people a license to mask their work as 'stupidly' and thus get away with it.
The reason that I put the word 'stupidity' in quotation marks is that the problem in the intellectual world is not intellectual weakness - the problem is the misapplication of intellectual strength. The strong in any field always blame the weak - not because it is the weak's fault - but because the weak can't prevent them from doing so.
It is easy to ridicule the weak - and it shifts blame from where it belongs - with the strong - to people who don't deserve it. If intellectual problems were caused by intellectual weakness then surely dirt is the cause of all intellectual trouble - since I know of few things dumber that dirt.
We - the intellectually strong - need to accept the blame for what is wrong with the world. We are the ones who have the power to change it, and we are the ones who are responsible for the problems in the first place.
The only additional comment that I would like to make is that DVDs are not the result of stupidity; they are not an accident nor are the problems caused by DVDs an unintended side effect.
DVDs are an example of deliberate, intentional, malevolence at work - as is the DMCA - which makes things like DVD's possible.
The phrase : 'never attribute to malice that which may be explained by stupidity' applies to neither the DMCA nor DVDs.
DVD is the bastard created when our beautiful innocent High Tech was brutally raped by the RIAA. The engineer who created it ought to be deeply ashamed of his actions as an accomplice in that rape.
The copy protection and region encoding on DVD's have nothing to do with preventing commercial pirating and everything to do with controlling what the customer can do with the product that he bought. Claiming that copy protection has to do with piracy is a flat out lie. Commercial pirates are not inconvenienced in the least by copy protection - they make a bit for bit copy of the disk and stamp them out as fast as they want. Only you - the customer is affected in what you can do with your own property . According to the RIAA 'fair use' doesn't exist, and they won't be happy until the courts agree with them.
The problem is not that Red Hat filed for the patents - the problem is that they could file for the patents.
Software patents are ridiculous - they are the work of ONE MAN who both pushed the idea as a practice and later became a judge and ruled on the legality of his own creation! . Can you say "conflict of interest"? Historically software was properly ruled out as being unpatenable.
No, what I said is precisely true. The ruling absolutely re-establishes the situation which existed pre breakup; Bell controls what may and may not be done over their wires.
The Bells don't have to worry about anti-trust; the ruling effectively grants them their absolute regional monopolies back.
The key issue is ISP's - Bell collects a line charge regardless of who the ISP is - dial up or DSL. My DSL connection uses my local computer user group as the ISP but the bulk of my payment (all but $5.00 a month) goes to directly to SW Bell as line charges. What the ruling does is force me to send the other $5.00 to Bell also. This will put me on SW Bell as an ISP - disrupting my home page, email address, and greatly lowering the quality of my connection to the Internet. Bell hates my local computer group because they make them look so bad as an ISP.
It makes NO difference whether the signal is analog and dial up or DSL the situation is legally identical.
You can expect the Baby Bells to start squeezing other ISP's out - they'll start with the weakest - who can't fight back effectively in court and use the precedents of this case and the victories over the weak ISPs to get rid of the strong ones like AOL.
This will happen, and the government won't say a thing; AOL - Time Warner will run the cable modem market and Bell will be the phone ISP - those will be your choices. Bell will argue - and the courts will back them up - that they don't get to use the cable company's connections to houses - so AOL - Time Warner doesn't get to use the phone lines.
Using precisely the arguments which won this case the regional Bells can now put every other dial up ISP out of business. You will use your local Bell for your dial up or you can kiss your internet connection good bye. Since AOL etc. are dial up ISP's they're gone too. We'll shortly be back to the days of "We're the phone company - we don't care, we don't have to."
The free market breaks down when you are dealing with a monopoly because - by definition - there is no competition to keep them in line.
This is blindingly obvious - but somehow that point seems to elude most people's mental grasp.
No structure created by mankind reaches to infinity, and that includes the idea of a free market. There are boundary conditions under which the free market breaks down and becomes destructive; it is important to understand what those failure conditions are.
Yes, all true. You correctly understood what I was saying, and I understood it too. Thank you for clarifying what I was saying.
There are a couple of important points you missed: The total damage done by radioactivity to biological organisms is the same because the total dosage to living organisms will be the same. A million years down the road everyone is better off because we 'burned' up all of the Uranium now. If we burn up all of the Uranium nobody will be able to build nuclear weapons involving fission in the future! Compared to the damage from the detonation of a single nuclear weapon Chernobyl is nothing.
Do we do more damage to our selves now by burning the Uranium is reactors? Maybe, maybe not - encapsulate the waste in ceramics and it is pretty stable over its really dangerous life time.
When we burn fossil fuel like coal we release radioactive Carbon 13 into the atmosphere - the amounts are really large since you have to burn so much more chemical fuel than nuclear to get the same amount of energy.
If we turn off the electricity then millions of people will die in the cities - 18th century technology can't support 21st century cities. For example: there is no way using horse and buggies to bring enough food into a city to support it.
If you attempted to use horse and buggies to try you would find out what pollution really is: the horse droppings would breed so many flies that disease would rise rapidly. The automobile, by getting rid of the horse dropping - fly problem, greatly cleaned up the cities. Cities are much cleaner now than they were at the start of any other century in history. This is part of the reason that life expectancy is up over previous centuries.
Like all technological problems the solutions to the power generation problem have trade offs. If you look at all of the factors nuclear fission comes out near the top of the pile. (Pun intentional). Any thing you do - or fail to do has negative consequences. Sorry, that is how the universe works. Stay out in the sun unprotected and it will kill you; Greens want us to do better than God. Sorry I don't know how to do that - and neither does anyone else.
There is a real lack of critical thinking involved in the nuclear waste issue.
1. We are not importing the Uranium from Mars; it all comes from the Earth.
2. Every single atom of Uranium in the Earth is going to decay - producing all the same radioactive wastes whether mankind is involved or not. The natural decay products spread the same amount of radioactive energy over time - but the total radioactive energy from the fission and decay processes is about the same. The only issues involving mankind are the rate of production, the location and the local concentration of the radioactive wastes - not its creation. If we had never discovered fission the radioactivity from Uranium decay would still exist.
3. There was a naturally occurring nuclear reactor in Africa where a deposit of Uranium moderated by spring water fissioned all of the U235 out of the ore. As far as anyone can tell the long term results of this reactor on the local biology were zilch.
4. The total quantity of pollutants produced by fission for a given power production is much less than that produced by combustion - no green house gasses at all. Until fusion is practical on a large scale fission is the best short term alternative available.
"Greens" are massive hypocrites: I have yet to see a Green walk to a protest rally on bare feet while wearing nothing else but crude fabrics woven by hand from natural sources. Greens don't really want to give up the advantages of modern society; they just want to be the ones in charge of their use. Sorry, no sale; it is all just another boring power game played at my expense - how utterly banal.
When a geek reads the PDF it makes sense to us - from our innocent emotionally herbivorous geek point of view - to say that these consequences were unintended bugs, and that the DMCA obviously needs to be fixed to remedy these accidental side effects.
However, that would be a misreading or our opponents actions and motivations.
The law was not passed accidentally; it was a deliberate and intentional action.
The effects of the law are not unintended; it was specifically designed by the industry groups who asked for its existence to curtail exactly the fair use activities - and stifle exactly the scientific research and free speech activities which it has done. An example of an unintended consequence would be if the DMCA wound up some how curtailing the use of electric cow milking machines; the cases sited in the paper were all directly on target and intentional
The law was not passed as an oversight. For example: it was not tacked on to an appropriations bill where the majority of the legislators were unaware of its existence. The law was passed by both houses of congress after due processing by those houses and at the recommendation of committees charged with studying its consequences. It was signed into law by the President of the United States who acted upon the recommendation of his staff.
The law is not the act of stupidity; there is no indication that any of the people involved in the passage of this law are mentally deficient; most of them are lawyers and possess a law degree - which is recognized as the equivalent in educational achievement of a Ph.D.. Nor is there any evidence that the people involved with the passage of this law had a temporary lapse of their mental faculties; there is no indication - such as misspelled words etc. that this law was written by people under the influence of intoxication.
The law is malicious; it makes a federal felony out of actions which have always been held as innocent, legal and which the courts have always upheld as fair.
The DMCA is a deliberate, intentional, malicious, act by our government on the behalf of an industry group which seeks to improperly control the actions of the public at large and to unjustly profit at the expense of that public. The act does not need fixing it needs to be repealed - and an investigation into possible bribery of the public officials who foisted it upon us needs to be launched. This is the only way in which pernicious laws of this type can be prevented in the future.
The rule "Never attribute to malice that which may be explained by stupidity" does not apply here; the DMCA is not an act of stupidity but one of deliberate malice. Everyone in the world needs to learn the skill of being able to spot the difference between a malicious action and a stupid one.
If you are the only person in the room - there is no chance for conflict with anyone else in that room. If there is another person in the room - there is a chance for conflict. Like chemical reactions; conflict goes as the square of the density of the reactants.
What is remarkable is not that there are wars - but that there is not a continuous war with everybody fighting all the time.
Given the possibility for conflict - people actually get along really well the vast majority of the time - if they didn't we couldn't exist.
If war were a common occurrence it wouldn't be newsworthy; the news is reserved for extraordinary events.
The problem with improved communication is that in effect - you expand the size of your 'room' which increases the number of people who are inside of it - thus greatly raising the chance of conflict.
If I don't write anything here there is zero chance of my ideas creating conflict with other poster's ideas. In a very real sense isolationism is the only way to prevent conflict - of course there is an enormous price to be paid for isolationism.
Show me any species of creatures which exist on this planet without conflict - there isn't one - there can't be one; life itself is in conflict with death.
There was a wonderful quote from ancient times I saw recently, it said: "Most people don't desire liberty, they wish only for a just ruler".
How sadly true; it reminds me of the observation by Eric Hoffer: "Given freedom of choice, most people choose to be just like everyone else."
It is only the very few in each generation to whom freedom matters.
If the fact that corporations tend toward evil proves that capitalism is inherently bad - then liberals have even more to explain: Stalin's purges, Janet Reno's children's barbecue in Waco, the list goes on and on.
Liberals are afraid that conservatives will turn the country into a fascist state - and only want guns to kill blacks. Conservatives are afraid that the liberals will be waving Mao's little red book and selling the U.S. out to the Chicoms before they can turn around.
They are both right.
There are evil people in control of every ideology - form a new one, and here come the evil people to corrupt whatever it is that you meant to do.
Until we learn to recognize evil mo matter what its disguise and go after evil itself the good people are always going to be in trouble.
Humanity is like a herd of Wildebeests who have been conned into letting the Lions govern them.
Sorry for the typo - it was supposed to be: an engineering...
At the time that the 8086 came out Intel also produced a 32 bit processor which was going to use Ada as its 'assembly' language. It was a complete and total failure. No one ever bought any to speak of - it was actually slower than an 8080 eight bit machine!
That older 32 bit flop kind of reminds me of Itanium; a grandiose architecture with no performance and no software; other than those minor flaws they are both fine machines. I expect the Itanium to have about the same level of success in the market place as it did.
When the 8086 processor debuted it was by far an inferior processor to both the Zilog Z8000 and the Motorola 68000. It wound up dominating the market place for several reasons.
1. Software - the 8086 had a leg up on everyone because it had a translator which allowed the thousands of CP/M applications to be ported to it easily. The killer ap at the time was WordStar.
2. The 8086, and in particular the 8088, were less expensive to build machines around.
3. The 68000 and the Z8000 were comparatively elegant and beautiful designs; the 8086 was strong and ugly. Pick Mike Tyson over Cindy Crawford in a fight. Intel was able to turn marketing from a engineering and software beauty contest into a fight - and it came out on top.
Today the shoe is on the other foot.
1. The Opteron does a much better job of running 32 bit aps than either Merced or Mckinley - similar to advantage 1 above.
2. The Amd processor will be a lot less expensive to build for - reason number 2 above.
3. The Intel processor has the beautiful new architecture - the Opteron the good old strong and ugly one.
The only way Intel is going to come out on top this time is to make an even stronger and uglier 64 bit version of the X86; something which looks like a 64 bit version of the current Pentium 4 - ridiculous pipeline for super high clock speeds etc.
Not specifically this case - but I would like to point out that "Class Action" lawsuits mainly benefit the lawyers who file them and basically no one else.
Here is how the scam works - One million plaintiffs each of whom gets say $10 - the lawyers pocket 15% or more of each judgment; so the lawyers take down a cool couple of million.
Very cute - if anyone but lawyers pulled a similar scam they would be in prison for fraud.
Yin and Yang at work; the one thing that the media won't tolerate is any conflict with its view of the world. They have an automatic - subconscious understanding that their positions don't stand up very well when examined.
Conflict every where else is ok with them.
Thanks for the information on the 'Fairness Doctrine'.
Television long ago learned that the highest ratings come from controversy; people watch fights - not shows where people get along.
As a result TV stirs up controversy whenever it can to increase ratings. This is the real reason that the so called 'fairness doctrine' where both sides of any dispute are required to be presented continues; people watch conflict.
Given that TV principally shows conflict - it creates the impression in the viewers that conflict is all that exists; how could it do anything but make relations between people in the world worse?
Most of the people I know - at least the ones who accomplish anything - are just the opposite; they appear unhappy and even perhaps, a little mean, but on the inside they are really wonderful people.
What you are describing is a phony turd; if you think that is normal human behavior you have done a great job of telling everybody what you are.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen have both been dumping Microsoft stock as fast as they can; i.e. without facing a legal requirement to disclose what they are doing. I believe that I read that Allen has already completely divested his interest in Microsoft. Gates has been dumping about a million shares a month for more than two years.
Question: - which anyone except a self deluded clueless business major could answer correctly - "Why would they be doing that if the stock were as solid as you imply?"
Of course there are PHB style answers to that question: "They want to increase there own personal liquidity" etc. But those type of answers are exactly the "self deluded clueless business major" sort of answer I meant.
Gates himself has warned many times that someone could come up with a technological innovation that could make Microsoft obsolete overnight - Microsoft investors don't seem to think that is possible but he does, and I suspect that he has a much better grasp of that than all of the clueless investors do. Why do you think that Gates has a trust fund set up to pay the taxes on his house? Answer: He knows it could all go away as quickly as it came.
Any company which really doesn't produce anything tangible is a bubble waiting to burst; and ones and zeroes are not tangible. Other than their cash reserves Microsoft has very few tangible assets. If their source code goes obsolete they are gone.
I intend to double check and make sure that my managed 401K hasn't got one dime invested in Microsoft stock.
The original poster in this thread is correct; Microsoft's collapse will be Enron style and spectacular.
See Malcolm Livingston's book "General Relativity - A geometric approach" for a discussion of the expanding charge creating a gravitational field similar to that of a planet - inward directed. By the way - NASA has been granted two patents on asymmetrical capacitor thrusters. The proofs that it is not some sort of ion wind phenomena are pretty simple:
1. if you make the capacitors symmetrical the effect disappears. 2. if you change the polarity of the voltage on asymmetrical capacitors the effect is unchanged. If it were ion wind the direction of the thrust would be reversed. 3. if you put an ion wind blocker between the terminals of an asymmetrical capacitor the lift effect remains.
Sorry I had to drop out of the discussion for a while - I had other things I had to do.
One again the only relevant questions are: "Does it work? Is it repeatable?".
Try it and see if you can get it to work - eliminate the possible errors - if it still works - it is real. If you can't get it to work and other people can then your failure only proves you don't know what you are doing and nothing else.
The experiments have been done by NASA in a vacuum chamber. They need to be duplicated.
By the way reference to an authority is also a fallacy and proves nothing.
Did it ever occur to you that mass might not be very effective at distorting space, and that energy might be? Remember that we are talking about local distortions - not large ones like a planet causes. Once again the key questions are: "Does it work? Is it repeatable". If the answer to those questions are "Yes" nothing else matters. Theory has to be adjusted to fit reality - not the other way around.
It is said that 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof' I would say that a crude electrogravitic kite lifting an 18 gram payload is pretty extraordinary. If the experiment can be easily repeated and duplicated the argument is over. If you read the pages carefully some of the experimenters are professional scientists.
You are going to get someone killed: when you charge up a capacitor you store energy which can supply enough current to kill someone. These experiments are potentially lethal. The flyback circuits used to generate the high voltages are dangerous.
At the start of the 20th century it was the general consensus of the scientific elite that heavier than air powered flight was a pipe dream and impossible. While it was conceded that birds and insects could fly it was obvious that they were light - nothing heavy enough to carry a man could possibly fly. Attempts to do so were met with great scorn.
There was only one serious scientist attempting heavier than air powered flight; professor Langley. His repeated failures were held as proof to the scientific establishment that flight was an impossibility and a waste of time and money - pseudo science at its worst.
Fortunately for mankind a pair of bicycle mechanics didn't know that it was pseudo science and impossible. When the Wright brothers succeeded in doing what all of the physicists said was impossible they changed the world. Of course today airplanes are an obvious fact of reality and no one but a complete idiot claims that there is any pseudo science involved in their construction. The ridicule of the early 20th century has long been forgotten.
Now in the early 21st century mainstream science ridicules 'electrogravitics' as pseudo science. Once again mainstream physicists are simply wrong. The key point in anything is "Does it work, and is it repeatable?"
General relativity predicts electrogravitics - one case which has been solved is this: if a cloud of charged particles is allowed to expand outward an inward pointing gravitational field will be generated.
Einstein used Maxwell's equations in formulating general relativity. All of you are familiar with the concept that mass and energy are related; if mass can change space-time why is it impossible for energy to do the same thing?
Basically what is going on in these lifters is this: When you charge a capacitor energy flows into the capacitor from the surrounding space via the Poynting vector. When you charge an asymmetrical capacitor you draw energy from the surrounding space in an asymmetrical fashion; this distorts the surrounding space. Distorted space is a gravitational field.
This is not 'ion wind' NASA has tested asymmetrical capacitors in vacuum chambers; the thrust is still there. Not much has been said about this in the general public but the fact is that the world is about to change dramatically.
In some ways the 21st century is an echo of the twentieth: science will be dragged kicking and screaming into the future whether it likes it or not, and once again very important work has been done by non scientists.
Like the early history of flight the field is full of both crackpots and people who know what they are doing. When you view these web pages understand what you are looking at; you are seeing the equivalent of the 'box kites' which were flown by experimenters and dreamers in the late 19th century. There is a direct line from those crude box kites to the space shuttle - the difference is 80 years of engineering.
See for yourself whether or not these 21st century box kites fly - if they do don't worry about the science: it will be forced to catch up. This is real, and it is quite literally 'warp drive' unfolding before your eyes.
By the way - the voltages involved are lethal - if you do these experiments be damned careful!
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Sorry, I was wrong; I would like to make one more point. Probably the biggest problem with the formal system of higher education is that it teaches a perspective which causes people to miss deliberate malice in action.
In my opinion one of the fundamental changes which needs to occur in the educational system is to teach people how to critically differentiate accident or 'stupidity' from deliberate malice. Failing to do so grants malevolent people a license to mask their work as 'stupidly' and thus get away with it.
The reason that I put the word 'stupidity' in quotation marks is that the problem in the intellectual world is not intellectual weakness - the problem is the misapplication of intellectual strength. The strong in any field always blame the weak - not because it is the weak's fault - but because the weak can't prevent them from doing so.
It is easy to ridicule the weak - and it shifts blame from where it belongs - with the strong - to people who don't deserve it. If intellectual problems were caused by intellectual weakness then surely dirt is the cause of all intellectual trouble - since I know of few things dumber that dirt.
We - the intellectually strong - need to accept the blame for what is wrong with the world. We are the ones who have the power to change it, and we are the ones who are responsible for the problems in the first place.
The only additional comment that I would like to make is that DVDs are not the result of stupidity; they are not an accident nor are the problems caused by DVDs an unintended side effect.
DVDs are an example of deliberate, intentional, malevolence at work - as is the DMCA - which makes things like DVD's possible.
The phrase : 'never attribute to malice that which may be explained by stupidity' applies to neither the DMCA nor DVDs.
DVD is the bastard created when our beautiful innocent High Tech was brutally raped by the RIAA. The engineer who created it ought to be deeply ashamed of his actions as an accomplice in that rape.
The copy protection and region encoding on DVD's have nothing to do with preventing commercial pirating and everything to do with controlling what the customer can do with the product that he bought. Claiming that copy protection has to do with piracy is a flat out lie. Commercial pirates are not inconvenienced in the least by copy protection - they make a bit for bit copy of the disk and stamp them out as fast as they want. Only you - the customer is affected in what you can do with your own property . According to the RIAA 'fair use' doesn't exist, and they won't be happy until the courts agree with them.
The problem is not that Red Hat filed for the patents - the problem is that they could file for the patents.
Software patents are ridiculous - they are the work of ONE MAN who both pushed the idea as a practice and later became a judge and ruled on the legality of his own creation! . Can you say "conflict of interest"? Historically software was properly ruled out as being unpatenable.
No, what I said is precisely true. The ruling absolutely re-establishes the situation which existed pre breakup; Bell controls what may and may not be done over their wires.
The Bells don't have to worry about anti-trust; the ruling effectively grants them their absolute regional monopolies back.
The key issue is ISP's - Bell collects a line charge regardless of who the ISP is - dial up or DSL. My DSL connection uses my local computer user group as the ISP but the bulk of my payment (all but $5.00 a month) goes to directly to SW Bell as line charges. What the ruling does is force me to send the other $5.00 to Bell also. This will put me on SW Bell as an ISP - disrupting my home page, email address, and greatly lowering the quality of my connection to the Internet. Bell hates my local computer group because they make them look so bad as an ISP.
It makes NO difference whether the signal is analog and dial up or DSL the situation is legally identical.
You can expect the Baby Bells to start squeezing other ISP's out - they'll start with the weakest - who can't fight back effectively in court and use the precedents of this case and the victories over the weak ISPs to get rid of the strong ones like AOL.
This will happen, and the government won't say a thing; AOL - Time Warner will run the cable modem market and Bell will be the phone ISP - those will be your choices. Bell will argue - and the courts will back them up - that they don't get to use the cable company's connections to houses - so AOL - Time Warner doesn't get to use the phone lines.
Yes the phone companies own the wires. HOWEVER.
Using precisely the arguments which won this case the regional Bells can now put every other dial up ISP out of business. You will use your local Bell for your dial up or you can kiss your internet connection good bye. Since AOL etc. are dial up ISP's they're gone too. We'll shortly be back to the days of "We're the phone company - we don't care, we don't have to."
The free market breaks down when you are dealing with a monopoly because - by definition - there is no competition to keep them in line.
This is blindingly obvious - but somehow that point seems to elude most people's mental grasp.
No structure created by mankind reaches to infinity, and that includes the idea of a free market. There are boundary conditions under which the free market breaks down and becomes destructive; it is important to understand what those failure conditions are.
Windows is only costly if you're trying to do something serious
A minor point: no true green has any business ever being on the internet or allowing technology like cameras to be used on his behalf.
A real Green is so busy trying to claw a living out of the dirt that he hasn't got any time free to go to protest meetings - so fake and poseur.
I have great respect for true Greens - but fakes are just playing power games.
Booooring.
Yes, all true. You correctly understood what I was saying, and I understood it too. Thank you for clarifying what I was saying.
There are a couple of important points you missed: The total damage done by radioactivity to biological organisms is the same because the total dosage to living organisms will be the same. A million years down the road everyone is better off because we 'burned' up all of the Uranium now. If we burn up all of the Uranium nobody will be able to build nuclear weapons involving fission in the future! Compared to the damage from the detonation of a single nuclear weapon Chernobyl is nothing.
Do we do more damage to our selves now by burning the Uranium is reactors? Maybe, maybe not - encapsulate the waste in ceramics and it is pretty stable over its really dangerous life time.
When we burn fossil fuel like coal we release radioactive Carbon 13 into the atmosphere - the amounts are really large since you have to burn so much more chemical fuel than nuclear to get the same amount of energy.
If we turn off the electricity then millions of people will die in the cities - 18th century technology can't support 21st century cities. For example: there is no way using horse and buggies to bring enough food into a city to support it.
If you attempted to use horse and buggies to try you would find out what pollution really is: the horse droppings would breed so many flies that disease would rise rapidly. The automobile, by getting rid of the horse dropping - fly problem, greatly cleaned up the cities. Cities are much cleaner now than they were at the start of any other century in history. This is part of the reason that life expectancy is up over previous centuries.
Like all technological problems the solutions to the power generation problem have trade offs. If you look at all of the factors nuclear fission comes out near the top of the pile. (Pun intentional). Any thing you do - or fail to do has negative consequences. Sorry, that is how the universe works. Stay out in the sun unprotected and it will kill you; Greens want us to do better than God. Sorry I don't know how to do that - and neither does anyone else.
There is a real lack of critical thinking involved in the nuclear waste issue.
1. We are not importing the Uranium from Mars; it all comes from the Earth.
2. Every single atom of Uranium in the Earth is going to decay - producing all the same radioactive wastes whether mankind is involved or not. The natural decay products spread the same amount of radioactive energy over time - but the total radioactive energy from the fission and decay processes is about the same. The only issues involving mankind are the rate of production, the location and the local concentration of the radioactive wastes - not its creation. If we had never discovered fission the radioactivity from Uranium decay would still exist.
3. There was a naturally occurring nuclear reactor in Africa where a deposit of Uranium moderated by spring water fissioned all of the U235 out of the ore. As far as anyone can tell the long term results of this reactor on the local biology were zilch.
4. The total quantity of pollutants produced by fission for a given power production is much less than that produced by combustion - no green house gasses at all. Until fusion is practical on a large scale fission is the best short term alternative available.
"Greens" are massive hypocrites: I have yet to see a Green walk to a protest rally on bare feet while wearing nothing else but crude fabrics woven by hand from natural sources. Greens don't really want to give up the advantages of modern society; they just want to be the ones in charge of their use. Sorry, no sale; it is all just another boring power game played at my expense - how utterly banal.
However, that would be a misreading or our opponents actions and motivations.
The DMCA is a deliberate, intentional, malicious, act by our government on the behalf of an industry group which seeks to improperly control the actions of the public at large and to unjustly profit at the expense of that public. The act does not need fixing it needs to be repealed - and an investigation into possible bribery of the public officials who foisted it upon us needs to be launched. This is the only way in which pernicious laws of this type can be prevented in the future.
The rule "Never attribute to malice that which may be explained by stupidity" does not apply here; the DMCA is not an act of stupidity but one of deliberate malice. Everyone in the world needs to learn the skill of being able to spot the difference between a malicious action and a stupid one
If you are the only person in the room - there is no chance for conflict with anyone else in that room. If there is another person in the room - there is a chance for conflict. Like chemical reactions; conflict goes as the square of the density of the reactants.
What is remarkable is not that there are wars - but that there is not a continuous war with everybody fighting all the time.
Given the possibility for conflict - people actually get along really well the vast majority of the time - if they didn't we couldn't exist.
If war were a common occurrence it wouldn't be newsworthy; the news is reserved for extraordinary events.
The problem with improved communication is that in effect - you expand the size of your 'room' which increases the number of people who are inside of it - thus greatly raising the chance of conflict.
If I don't write anything here there is zero chance of my ideas creating conflict with other poster's ideas. In a very real sense isolationism is the only way to prevent conflict - of course there is an enormous price to be paid for isolationism.
Show me any species of creatures which exist on this planet without conflict - there isn't one - there can't be one; life itself is in conflict with death.
There was a wonderful quote from ancient times I saw recently, it said: "Most people don't desire liberty, they wish only for a just ruler".
How sadly true; it reminds me of the observation by Eric Hoffer: "Given freedom of choice, most people choose to be just like everyone else."
It is only the very few in each generation to whom freedom matters.
If the fact that corporations tend toward evil proves that capitalism is inherently bad - then liberals have even more to explain: Stalin's purges, Janet Reno's children's barbecue in Waco, the list goes on and on.
Liberals are afraid that conservatives will turn the country into a fascist state - and only want guns to kill blacks. Conservatives are afraid that the liberals will be waving Mao's little red book and selling the U.S. out to the Chicoms before they can turn around.
They are both right.
There are evil people in control of every ideology - form a new one, and here come the evil people to corrupt whatever it is that you meant to do.
Until we learn to recognize evil mo matter what its disguise and go after evil itself the good people are always going to be in trouble.
Humanity is like a herd of Wildebeests who have been conned into letting the Lions govern them.
Sigh.
Sorry for the typo - it was supposed to be: an engineering...
At the time that the 8086 came out Intel also produced a 32 bit processor which was going to use Ada as its 'assembly' language. It was a complete and total failure. No one ever bought any to speak of - it was actually slower than an 8080 eight bit machine!
That older 32 bit flop kind of reminds me of Itanium; a grandiose architecture with no performance and no software; other than those minor flaws they are both fine machines. I expect the Itanium to have about the same level of success in the market place as it did.
When the 8086 processor debuted it was by far an inferior processor to both the Zilog Z8000 and the Motorola 68000. It wound up dominating the market place for several reasons.
1. Software - the 8086 had a leg up on everyone because it had a translator which allowed the thousands of CP/M applications to be ported to it easily. The killer ap at the time was WordStar.
2. The 8086, and in particular the 8088, were less expensive to build machines around.
3. The 68000 and the Z8000 were comparatively elegant and beautiful designs; the 8086 was strong and ugly. Pick Mike Tyson over Cindy Crawford in a fight. Intel was able to turn marketing from a engineering and software beauty contest into a fight - and it came out on top.
Today the shoe is on the other foot.
1. The Opteron does a much better job of running 32 bit aps than either Merced or Mckinley - similar to advantage 1 above.
2. The Amd processor will be a lot less expensive to build for - reason number 2 above.
3. The Intel processor has the beautiful new architecture - the Opteron the good old strong and ugly one.
The only way Intel is going to come out on top this time is to make an even stronger and uglier 64 bit version of the X86; something which looks like a 64 bit version of the current Pentium 4 - ridiculous pipeline for super high clock speeds etc.
Right now things don't look very good for Intel.
Not specifically this case - but I would like to point out that "Class Action" lawsuits mainly benefit the lawyers who file them and basically no one else.
Here is how the scam works - One million plaintiffs each of whom gets say $10 - the lawyers pocket 15% or more of each judgment; so the lawyers take down a cool couple of million.
Very cute - if anyone but lawyers pulled a similar scam they would be in prison for fraud.
Yin and Yang at work; the one thing that the media won't tolerate is any conflict with its view of the world. They have an automatic - subconscious understanding that their positions don't stand up very well when examined.
Conflict every where else is ok with them.
Thanks for the information on the 'Fairness Doctrine'.
There is no great mystery here.
Television long ago learned that the highest ratings come from controversy; people watch fights - not shows where people get along.
As a result TV stirs up controversy whenever it can to increase ratings. This is the real reason that the so called 'fairness doctrine' where both sides of any dispute are required to be presented continues; people watch conflict.
Given that TV principally shows conflict - it creates the impression in the viewers that conflict is all that exists; how could it do anything but make relations between people in the world worse?
Most of the people I know - at least the ones who accomplish anything - are just the opposite; they appear unhappy and even perhaps, a little mean, but on the inside they are really wonderful people.
What you are describing is a phony turd; if you think that is normal human behavior you have done a great job of telling everybody what you are.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen have both been dumping Microsoft stock as fast as they can; i.e. without facing a legal requirement to disclose what they are doing. I believe that I read that Allen has already completely divested his interest in Microsoft. Gates has been dumping about a million shares a month for more than two years.
Question: - which anyone except a self deluded clueless business major could answer correctly - "Why would they be doing that if the stock were as solid as you imply?"
Of course there are PHB style answers to that question: "They want to increase there own personal liquidity" etc. But those type of answers are exactly the "self deluded clueless business major" sort of answer I meant.
Gates himself has warned many times that someone could come up with a technological innovation that could make Microsoft obsolete overnight - Microsoft investors don't seem to think that is possible but he does, and I suspect that he has a much better grasp of that than all of the clueless investors do. Why do you think that Gates has a trust fund set up to pay the taxes on his house? Answer: He knows it could all go away as quickly as it came.
Any company which really doesn't produce anything tangible is a bubble waiting to burst; and ones and zeroes are not tangible. Other than their cash reserves Microsoft has very few tangible assets. If their source code goes obsolete they are gone.
I intend to double check and make sure that my managed 401K hasn't got one dime invested in Microsoft stock.
The original poster in this thread is correct; Microsoft's collapse will be Enron style and spectacular.
See Malcolm Livingston's book "General Relativity - A geometric approach" for a discussion of the expanding charge creating a gravitational field similar to that of a planet - inward directed. By the way - NASA has been granted two patents on asymmetrical capacitor thrusters. The proofs that it is not some sort of ion wind phenomena are pretty simple:
1. if you make the capacitors symmetrical the effect disappears.
2. if you change the polarity of the voltage on asymmetrical capacitors the effect is unchanged. If it were ion wind the direction of the thrust would be reversed.
3. if you put an ion wind blocker between the terminals of an asymmetrical capacitor the lift effect remains.
Sorry I had to drop out of the discussion for a while - I had other things I had to do.
One again the only relevant questions are: "Does it work? Is it repeatable?".
Try it and see if you can get it to work - eliminate the possible errors - if it still works - it is real. If you can't get it to work and other people can then your failure only proves you don't know what you are doing and nothing else.
The experiments have been done by NASA in a vacuum chamber. They need to be duplicated.
By the way reference to an authority is also a fallacy and proves nothing.
Did it ever occur to you that mass might not be very effective at distorting space, and that energy might be? Remember that we are talking about local distortions - not large ones like a planet causes. Once again the key questions are: "Does it work? Is it repeatable". If the answer to those questions are "Yes" nothing else matters. Theory has to be adjusted to fit reality - not the other way around.
It is said that 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof' I would say that a crude electrogravitic kite lifting an 18 gram payload is pretty extraordinary. If the experiment can be easily repeated and duplicated the argument is over. If you read the pages carefully some of the experimenters are professional scientists.
You are going to get someone killed: when you charge up a capacitor you store energy which can supply enough current to kill someone. These experiments are potentially lethal. The flyback circuits used to generate the high voltages are dangerous.
At the start of the 20th century it was the general consensus of the scientific elite that heavier than air powered flight was a pipe dream and impossible. While it was conceded that birds and insects could fly it was obvious that they were light - nothing heavy enough to carry a man could possibly fly. Attempts to do so were met with great scorn.
There was only one serious scientist attempting heavier than air powered flight; professor Langley. His repeated failures were held as proof to the scientific establishment that flight was an impossibility and a waste of time and money - pseudo science at its worst.
Fortunately for mankind a pair of bicycle mechanics didn't know that it was pseudo science and impossible. When the Wright brothers succeeded in doing what all of the physicists said was impossible they changed the world. Of course today airplanes are an obvious fact of reality and no one but a complete idiot claims that there is any pseudo science involved in their construction. The ridicule of the early 20th century has long been forgotten.
Now in the early 21st century mainstream science ridicules 'electrogravitics' as pseudo science. Once again mainstream physicists are simply wrong. The key point in anything is "Does it work, and is it repeatable?"
General relativity predicts electrogravitics - one case which has been solved is this: if a cloud of charged particles is allowed to expand outward an inward pointing gravitational field will be generated.
Einstein used Maxwell's equations in formulating general relativity. All of you are familiar with the concept that mass and energy are related; if mass can change space-time why is it impossible for energy to do the same thing?
Basically what is going on in these lifters is this: When you charge a capacitor energy flows into the capacitor from the surrounding space via the Poynting vector. When you charge an asymmetrical capacitor you draw energy from the surrounding space in an asymmetrical fashion; this distorts the surrounding space. Distorted space is a gravitational field.
This is not 'ion wind' NASA has tested asymmetrical capacitors in vacuum chambers; the thrust is still there. Not much has been said about this in the general public but the fact is that the world is about to change dramatically.
In some ways the 21st century is an echo of the twentieth: science will be dragged kicking and screaming into the future whether it likes it or not, and once again very important work has been done by non scientists.
Like the early history of flight the field is full of both crackpots and people who know what they are doing. When you view these web pages understand what you are looking at; you are seeing the equivalent of the 'box kites' which were flown by experimenters and dreamers in the late 19th century. There is a direct line from those crude box kites to the space shuttle - the difference is 80 years of engineering.
See for yourself whether or not these 21st century box kites fly - if they do don't worry about the science: it will be forced to catch up. This is real, and it is quite literally 'warp drive' unfolding before your eyes.
By the way - the voltages involved are lethal - if you do these experiments be damned careful!